The United States President, Donald Trump may have lost the November 2020 elections to Vice President Joe Biden but the incumbent’s slogan ‘Make America Great Again’ (MAGA) still resonates among diehard fans and its gaining more grounds.
Moguldom.com reports that the Karens, a meme used to denote a specific type of middle-class white woman, who exhibits behaviours that stem from privilege, came out in full force for Donald Trump. Some are finding this figure disturbing.
“More than 2016 after all that Donald Trump has done, all the misery he has caused, all the racism he has aroused, all the immigrant families he has destroyed, all the people who have left this life because of his mismanagement of a pandemic, still roughly half of the country voted to extend this horror show,” political commentator Charles M. Blow wrote in an opinion piece for the New York Times.
“Let me be specific and explicit here,” Blow added. “White people — both men and women — were the only group in which a majority voted for Trump, according to exit polls. To be exact, nearly three out of every five white voters in America are Trump voters.”
British-Nigerian women’s rights activist and campaigner Seyi Akiwowo tweeted along with a graph of the exit polls, “52% of white women voted for Trump in 2016 and New York Times exit polls predict this to be 55% in 2020.”
She got many replies.
“I’m disappointed by what these figures suggest about white women… but given everything that’s happened this year, I’m absolutely astonished by the suggestion that 18% (nearly a fifth) of black men voted for Trump. I definitely didn’t see that coming,” one user tweeted.
Another posted, “Let’s not lament white women for voting their interest. We need to address 18% Black men and 8% Black women voting Trump(and counting). Both are increases.”
Some wonder why white women would increasingly vote for Trump considering he is anti-abortion and has publicly made sexist comments. Perhaps it’s because he has positioned himself as the “defender of white America.” However, when it comes to making a choice between pro-feminist or pro-white, it seems that race is more important.
“The triumph of President-elect Donald Trump represents the failure of many things. One of them is white feminism,” Black feminist author Tamara Winfrey Harris wrote on bitchmedia.org after the election.
White feminists have had a complex relationship with race. Suffragette Susan B. Anthony, who fought for women’s voting rights in the late 19th century, called Black men “ignorant” and “along with other first-wave feminists, vehemently opposed the 15th Amendment which (on paper) gave the vote to Black men,” the Undefeated reported.
Besides white women, a larger percentage of every racial minority voted for Trump this year than in 2016. His votes grew among both Black men and Black women.
Black people voted overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates. Only 3- or 4 percent of Black women voted for the Republican candidate in 2008, 2012 and 2016. Yet Trump doubled that number this year, winning 8 percent of Black women’s votes, Blow wrote.
Black men, who as a whole have been moving away from the Democrats over the years, increased their votes for Trump this year to 18 percent.